SAQ wrote:Sun did OpenSolaris and Solaris/free to sell support and servers. Oracle (as has been said) isn't nearly as interested in taking on financial liabilities to build operating system or hardware market share, especially given that SPARC wasn't gaining much in the way of market share over the past few years.

Okay, all this is logical and sensible and so on. But it's also stupid.

Unless they plan to run Linux or AIX or Irix or HP-UX on their integrated vertical database "solutions" they have to keep working on Solaris anyhow. If they are too poor to pay for the downloading bandwidth, just make one copy available to me and I'll produce and sell them for four ninety-five each and make a tidy profit. The real cost of a software DVD is way under a buck and I can prove it. Ahem

What do they lose by making Solaris available ? Nothing. As people have said over and over and over, the Oracle model is selling solutions to big enterprises that need their expertise. Cutting Mom and Pop out of the equation isn't going to cost them a nickel.

However, it does cost them good will to close off access. It does cost them a pool of tech people who are acquainted with Solaris and like it. It does cost them mindshare. It does cost them visibility and puts them into the same coffin with IBM and DB2. And unless they have god himself working in the programming department, it also costs them outside constructive criticism and original ideas. Hell, most companies pay for advertising. These nerds refuse to accept it for free.

It's a stupid plan. Gain nothing, lose something. "But we're not gonna give anything away ! you kids get outta them apple trees !" It's the standard tight-assed, tight-fisted penny-grasping death grip dog in the manger mentality that eventually metastasizes throughout the company and causes death by rigidity. It's endemic to the US now. Why do all you honkies got such a tight ass ?

Hamei, first, yes they are running linux on the verticals. further, all those arguments go out the windows if oracle is not growing the server business. they don't need the distraction of satisfying solaris nerds. lastly, anyone that wasn't tight with oracle on solaris already left, or made plans to, during the year of no uncertainty.

skywriter wrote:lastly, anyone that wasn't tight with oracle on solaris already left, or made plans to, during the year of no uncertainty.

I think that's quite right. It's been obvious that Sun was going to have the same eventual fate as the old SGI for years now, and probably all of their moderately large customers had started to draft migration plans, if they had not actually started to execute them. The only open questions have been exactly how long it was going to take for Sun to wind down, and who was going to buy the carcass to pick the bones. Oracle's acquisition of Sun may actually have extended Solaris' lifespan a little bit.

...and it wasn't evil, stoopid corporations that doomed Sun, it was, and is, Linux on Intel. Heck, compare Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux" efforts with it's Solaris efforts over the years.

Writing on the Wall.

PS. As an aside, some of you may recall my own peculiar belief that Oracle's decision a decade or so ago to drop support for IRIX was the fatal wound that sealed IRIX's fate. I still stand by that opinion. Never underestimate the power of the dark side of the Force, um, sorry, Oracle!

josehill wrote:.PS. As an aside, some of you may recall my own peculiar belief that Oracle's decision a decade or so ago to drop support for IRIX was the fatal wound that sealed IRIX's fate.

It's not that peculiar. How can a company claim to be a major player in servers without a database ?

I still disagree about the rest. Are they or are they not currently working with Solaris ? As long as they are, it costs them next to nothing to give people advance warning that they will discontinue it (contrary to everything they said previously, which makes them ... umm ... liars, I think it's called ?) and then continue to make it available until they kill it. If they don't want to do it, then give it to the damned receptionist. I'm sure she'd be happy making a few hundred thou extra each year.

This whole tight-ass stupid "business case" line of crap does nothing but make the US into a miserable, non-creative useless bloodsucking fascist hellhole. Nothing good will come of it, mark my words.

Oh. The second Great Depression already came of it. Well heck, that didn't take long.

hamei wrote:This whole tight-ass stupid "business case" line of crap does nothing but make the US into a miserable, non-creative useless bloodsucking fascist hellhole. Nothing good will come of it, mark my words.

Hamei, this whole line of discussion demonstrates your intent is not to provide any insight into the workings of the business, as jose and i are doing. rather you are merely inciting discontent by repetitive reference to your well oiled evilly-motivated-political-strawboss monstrosity.

oracle is not motivated to satisfy the petulant ravings of all-you-can-eat-enterprise-wanna-be-Solaris-fanboys, it's true.

you want free, no strings attached, enterprise Unix? well then, Redhat is the Unix for you! born and bred by an army of like-minded demigods to conquer a global industry mainstay,by breeding a new generation of preprogrammed zealots bent on founding a new golden age of computer idolatry based on Linux supermen, and off the shelf commodity computer parts.

Well, opensolaris should come out with 2010.03 (it already missed the 2010.02 window) in the next following days.If for some reason opensolaris gets the axe, then maybe prices for the full enchilada SB2500 will tank

skywriter wrote:Hamei, this whole line of discussion demonstrates your intent is not to provide any insight into the workings of the business, as jose and i are doing. rather you are merely inciting discontent by repetitive reference to your well oiled evilly-motivated-political-strawboss monstrosity.

Oh contraire, monsieur. This is exactly how business has conducted itself over the past thirty years. Now go outside and take a look around at the result.

"evilly-motivated-political-strawboss monstrosity" Not a strawboss when it's the truth. Read the papers, Sky. The US is drowning in the sewer and a prime reason for that is the attitude and behavior of business.

hamei wrote:Oh contraire, monsieur. This is exactly how business has conducted itself over the past thirty years. Now go outside and take a look around at the result.

my dear compadre,

i don't disagree as to the in's and out's of the modern business machine. however, painting it all as an intrinsically malevolent process, motivated by countless nefarious reprobates and delighting in the misfortunes of the down-trodden cogs of a machine fueled by human misery, is one that i cannot subscribe to without considerable detachment from reality.

it's just normal business conducted with a touch of sensational media focusing inevitable thief you find in any class of work force on a few stereotypes of CEO's and executive management. i would expect to see the same distribution of miscreants at any level of employment. it's just a better story to pick a CEO rather than the dumpster driver.

Last edited by skywriter on Sun Apr 04, 2010 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

skywriter wrote:i don't disagree as to the in's and out's of the modern business machine. however, painting it all as an intrinsically malevolent process, motivated by countless nefarious reprobates and delighting in the misfortunes of the down-trodden cogs of a machine fueled by human misery, is one that i cannot subscribe to without considerable detachment from reality.

Come to China, where the effects of this modern business machine (aka throwback to the nineteenth century) are more readily apparent. Your reality will change. Sweeping it under the rug doesn't make the dirt go away.

hamei wrote:Come to China, where the effects of this modern business machine (aka throwback to the nineteenth century) are more readily apparent. Your reality will change. Sweeping it under the rug doesn't make the dirt go away.

so, perhaps the meat of the discussion is really the actions of the people's republic of china misguided acceptance of a business proposition that ultimately led to the decline in their environment and quality of life? are you merely blaming the gun industry for providing the means to put a bullet in the people's collective head?

skywriter wrote:so, perhaps the meat of the discussion is really the actions of the people's republic of china misguided acceptance of a business proposition that ultimately led to the decline in their environment and quality of life?

For every Faust there has to be a Mephistopheles. This current "friction" between the US and China is a joke. It's a pas de deux. The Project for a New American Century group could puff up the "service economy" sewage only because Deng's China was willing to pope dat barge, tote dat bail. But that situation is inherently unstable. Chinese people have heads as big as all outdoors, American people are redneck buffoons. It's a goddamn mess on both sides and both countries are knee-deep in it. Better make that neck-deep.

What's the root cause ? This is what we should be looking at.

I can make a damned good case that it's "business." Not the business we know - the sheet metal shop next door with five guys, the hamburger place that mom and pop run, the refrigerator repair shop with ten service guys. No, that's the smokescreen that the mnc's hide behind. It's the Enrons. The Herb Madoffs. The Donald Trumps, the Worldcoms, the Microsofts, the Kirk Kerkorians. Goldman-Sachs. The MBA's that put Jac Nasser at the top of Ford. (1)

You and jose like to brush these off as anomolies : but they are not. One case would be an anomoly. Maybe two. But when it's one case a day and most of it unreported, it's no longer an anomoly. It's the normal pattern for the twenty-first century Robber Barons. They crushed the country and the world once, there's a good chance they've done it again. After 1929 how anyone with an IQ over 30 could fall for that "get government off the backs of business" shit again, I will never understand.

Jose and Sky, you can talk and talk but it doesn't change the facts. The "businesses" of the US have decimated the country. Real wages have declined a good ten percent since 1973. The whole "invisible hand of the market" schtick is a fraud. What you get with deregulation and the "business case" paradigm for life is Chicago in the Thirties. Adjustments (2) to the basic paradigm are only going to delay the inevitable (and make it worse when it finally arrives.)

Jose, you've said yourself that everything you've ever read in the papers has been wrong. Wake up. Take what you already know and believe in it. The stinking garbage that Rupert Murdoch prints and the MBA crap that Harvard promotes is just a smokescreen for the biggest scam since the 1880's. Business is good when you control it and when the interests of business benefit the middle class. Otherwise you'd be better off to hand the country over to the Mafia. At least they have entertaining accents and some kind of honor. And the lasagna is good.

2. Which buffoon thought up this "force China to change the exchange rate" garbage ? Beyond the fact that the exchange rate is not the problem, merely a symptom, how about if the Chinese government passed a resolution saying that the US spends too much on its navy ? US better reduce military expenditures by 23%, those costs are distorting the free market so the US needs to stop doing that, as ordered by China. How can these people remember to breathe ? It's hard to believe that US senators can be sooo fucking stupid.

3. Oh yeah. Hu jintao insulted Obama by not going personally to the climate talks. Umm, guys ? Appointing a Mormon missionary from Taiwan as US ambassador to China was not an insult ? Would someone please get real over there ? Every time I think China is nuts, some effing nitwit in the US goes us one better.

Hamei, the problem is you that represent these things as an 'Business Management Conspiracy Theory'. All discussion goes out the window as you pull one element of the conspiracy after the other out to rationalize your original premise; Business is destroying the world.

So far you have:1) Evil leaders of injustice architecting total global economic ruin.2) Propaganda channels misdirecting the public attention away from realizing they're on the road to Apocalypse. 3) A corrupt Government bent on enacting legislation that will facilitate a system of inequalities that permit the devastation.4) Down-trodden Honest laborers pushed out of business by the evil overlords and relegated to welfare systems that perpetuate a state of systematic poverty.

the list goes on.

The fact is that: Yes, there are corporate figures that have misused the system to their own personal gain. nobody finds them until it's too late. they can do a lot of destruction. but the numbers of true villains is vanishingly small compared to total number of possible ones. Remember, Absolute power corrupts absolutely, it always will. how can you possibly put people in the position to make global decisions without taking the chance that a few may take the opportunity to go rogue? there is no way you can have a global economy without the chance that someone is going to get hurt.

hamei wrote:I still disagree about the rest. Are they or are they not currently working with Solaris ? As long as they are, it costs them next to nothing to give people advance warning that they will discontinue it (contrary to everything they said previously, which makes them ... umm ... liars, I think it's called ?) and then continue to make it available until they kill it.

We don't disagree about that at all. I've always been a big proponent of stable, predictable product life cycle management. I was just as cheesed off as anyone over SGI's silent abandonment of the N-3 policy, for example, and the lack of clarity around LCM is one of the things that keeps me from advocating for Apple products in the enterprise, despite being impressed with the actual utility of Apple's products.

eMGee wrote:America is a sinking ship, that's nothing new. Anyway, back on topic: I'm currently running still Solaris 9 on a SPARCstation 5 (with a 170 MHz SPARC and 224 MB RAM). How are they going to ‘enforce’ their licensing though? Especially for non-commercial/personal use?

It might be like SGI's system of discreetly looking the other way for hobbyists (IBM seems to do this for AIX as well), but unlike SGI and IBM Oracle doesn't allow patch access unless you have a paid support account, so that makes their terms somewhat self-invigilating, at least in practical terms (where boxes are connected to the Internet).

I wouldn't go out and trumpet the fact that you're using their software outside of license, though.

Keep in mind that all prior licenses are still valid, hence all of my machines running various versions of Solaris that I acquired licenses for under Sun's more permissive terms are still validly licensed until ownership transfers. Likewise any old Solaris 9 licenses you have would still be valid. There are other (non-US) jurisdictions where the "license goes poof when you sell the machine" clause is invalid - and indeed I'm not sure that that particular idea has been tested by the courts here yet, either.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

There are those who say I'm a bit of a curmudgeon. To them I reply: "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

eMGee wrote:America is a sinking ship, that's nothing new. Anyway, back on topic: I'm currently running still Solaris 9 on a SPARCstation 5 (with a 170 MHz SPARC and 224 MB RAM). How are they going to ‘enforce’ their licensing though? Especially for non-commercial/personal use?

It's possible that you are still covered under your original license terms. That does not necessarily mean that you will have access to patches, but my guess is that you are still entitled to run Solaris as you had been.